Brian's Blog

Reflections from Day 1 of the Google for Education Innovation Academy.

Introduction: Effective leadership is universally acknowledged as being an essential element in achieving school improvement (Leithwood & Jantzi, 1998; Hopkins, 2001). The ways in which leadership is created within an educational context; however, is a varied as teachers themselves. Traditionally, the expectation was that principals were across all levels of leadership; however, with the increasing complexities of schools, the belief has shifted. The roles of both the principals and teachers must change in order for improvement to become the norm throughout the culture of a school. Systems have adopted a framework of distribution as it has become impossible for one person to do it all. This modern of education encourage the empowerment of teacher (Harris & Muijs, 2002a) to lead and drive changes so that all students have the resources required to reach their level of proficiency (Devaney, 1987). Fullan (2001a) states that teachers are the key to school change. Teachers co...

It has been a full-on start to July with a jam-packed week of professional development provided by EdtechTeam & Google for Education.

Reflections from Day 2 of EduTECH 2017.

Reflections from Day 1 of EduTECH 2017.

One of the biggest challenges school leaders face is how to redesign the learning system to have the greatest effect on our students? With researchers such as John Hattie (2012) focusing his lens on the impact of the teacher on the student’s learning there is the push to have teachers identify ways that they can redesign the learning environment, redesign pedagogy and redesign assessment. How do we re-imagine the concept of school to make the teaching have the greatest effect on student learning in real and authentic ways and what will this look like? As we drill down into this question the focus is drawn further away from the upfront teaching and redirected firmly to student centred learning. Having a shared understanding of what learning looks like is essential as practitioners we can identify ways of embedding this into practice.  Learning is the essence of what happens in the classroom every day, but when we discover what good learners are and the keys to switch all le...

During my last holiday break, I had the opportunity tick one of my major things I wanted to do off my list of must do’s. It was to climb to the summit of Australia’s highest mountain, Mount Kosciusko with my extended family from all over Australia’s eastern seaboard. During the ascent, I had much time to reflect on the parallels between educational leadership and mountain climbing and how shared experiences can mean a variety of things depending on the person’s perspective. What I also noticed was in a state of reflection I was also able to recognize and empathize with the pain and joy of the others with me, as well as acknowledge my own state of being. With me climbing this mountain were my parents, my brother and sister and their families and my own. Beginning with myself, I was fully aware of the magical moments from streams of fresh mountain water, the beauty of falling snow crystals being blown around in the breeze, to the feeling of satisfaction knowing that I had reache...